Sunday, April 15, 2012

Trucks Return To The Rock On SPEED

Andy Hillenburg pulled it off when most said he was just plain crazy. He bought the unused Rockingham Motor Speedway and single-handedly revived it with some very strategic business moves.

He positioned the track as a testing facility, used it for some regional racing series and all the while quietly restored it to the level of safety required by today's NASCAR. His wish for a national series race has now come true. As Hillenburg entered the driver's meeting today, he got a standing ovation.

SPEED will televise the Camping World Truck Series race beginning with the pre-race show at 12:30PM. Rick Allen, Phil Parsons and Michael Waltrip will be joined by Hermie Sadler and Ray Dunlap on the race telecast.

We will have a live Twitter stream starting at 12:15PM ET. You can join use by typing the #TDP1 hashtag into the Twitter.com search box. My account is located at twitter.com/thedalyplanet if you would like to view who I follow to build your own timeline. Hope to see you there today.

16 comments:

Garry
said...

I LOVE IT! Andy Hillenburg deserves praise, high praise for bringing a track that never should have been stripped of a NASCAR date, back to glory. Next stop? Cup date. Mark my words...California and Kansas should be worried.

Kansas has nothing to worry about, just put up casinos there and its ISC controlled. California however may be in a bit of trouble. The crowds are smaller, the facility is looking aged and for every exciting finish there has been at that track, there have been 3 terrible stinkers.

M Editor -Great to see a longtime series team - Turner Motorsports at the front, even with a Cup driver behind the wheel ...sorry Piquet Jr had a misstep ...nice to see strong support as evidenced by the fannies in the seats ...and fitting to have MRN streaming live and Eli Gold with the call for NASCAR's return to The Rock ...thanks SPEED for the good pictures (mute button in use)Walter

I couldn't be happier for Andy. The Truck races are usually well delivered. Today's was very dis-jointed. The booth talk didn't always match the video being shown. They went to commercial, came back under caution with Mike Helton saying a few words. Took five minutes to say "debris caution". Bottom line was that Andy's efforts trumped the cliches from the booth.

Glad to see Andy give the command, he & his staff have worked so hard; well done; the crowd looked good.

Recently here have been some nasty comments on various topics (ie, Racehub, NASCAR Performance) about Danielle Trotta. Honestly...race reporters are not born, they are made. You either have a person who knows racing and gets the broadcasting degree, or you have a Krista Voda who has the broadcasting experience but not the racing knowledge. You have to learn one or the other. While Danielle is not perfect, I think they've been sending her out to shops and interviews, etc. so she can get to know the people and the sport, and the insiders seem to be treating her with more respect. I think she's done pretty well. Yes, I suppose she's 'eye candy'. But as a female, I get that no one gets on TV by being unattractive, male or female. And she's still a work in progress, but I think she gets better all the time, and some of the criticism on her is really sexist in a reverse sort of way.

Great day at The Rock! Excellent weather for fans, with enough breeze to keep things cool. I estimate the place was about 85% full.

I don't see a Cup date any time soon, though. For one thing, there's only one covered garage. That can be remedied but that's going to take money. I figure it will three or four years before Andy can afford it, since he just dropped $1M-plus for the SAFER walls.

The bigger problem with a Cup date is that the place only seats around 31,000. Obviously more seats can be put up, but we've already been down that road; the results were disastrous.

NASCAR should return the Truck series to its early days, when it barnstormed those tracks that didn't have Cup races. It was a great way to build fans for the sport as a whole.

I enjoyed watching the truck race at Rockingham. Very glad there was a nice crowd there. I'm completely shocked that Nascar actually went back and did something right. I think the only track (big track anyway) they ever returned to before was Watkins Glen. I could be wrong.

Thanks Andy for hanging in there and working hard. It seems to have paid off! Best race of the weekend!